Twelve Billion Seconds
by midnightneverland
Summary: There is a rage that boils in Warren's veins when he thinks of how many people have given up on Max already. She is not a lost cause. She is not helpless. He doesn't know what to do with this girl who is steel in a glass cage. Part Three of Seconds, set post-game.
1. Chapter 1

Warren stumbles under the weight of the boxes he's carrying, the beakers clinking as they rattle inside. His heel reaches for the door to the science classroom, kicking it open so he can exit the room.

"What are you doing?"

He nearly drops the box on his foot at the sudden voice and turns to see Brooke's face glaring at him.

"Jesus, Brooke," he mutters and tries to maneuver past her. She doesn't budge. "Oh, no, don't move," he adds as he finally gets past and tries to close the door behind him.

"She's fucked up. You know that, right? You think you can win her over?"

He sets the box down with a sigh. He was hoping to get the box to Ms. Grant before the next class period, but now it doesn't seem likely. "I'm trying," he says, clenching his jaw, "to be a good friend."

"Hmm." She whirls away before he can further argue his point. He watches her walk away, flabbergasted and thinking, certainly not for the first time, that he will never understand girls.

It's also not the first time someone has asked him that. There is a rage that boils in his veins when he thinks of how many people have given up on Max already. She is not a lost cause. She is not helpless. She is grieving. Every day he sees her, there's a little more color to her cheeks, though it isn't much. He admits that most of the time, she's not there, lost in the maze in her mind. But sometimes she will ask him about something he'd told her weeks ago. He tries so desperately to fill the silence between them that he will ramble until he's blue in the face. And sometimes, only sometimes, she will whack him on the arm to shut him up. It isn't much, but it's enough.

She leaves her room more and more as the days tick by. Twelve billion seconds have passed since he lost her and he can see pieces of her old self buried deep in her gaze when it flickers to meet him. She spends a lot of time in his dorm, sleeping on his couch or on the floor next to him while he's playing video games. Sometimes, he'll turn the captions on and read them aloud for her, just to keep silence from filling the room. Sometimes, she will lay her head in his lap and point out what he's missed when he gets stuck. Once, she reached up to stroke his face, her eyes glazed over as her thumb pressed against his cheekbone. He nearly jumped out of his skin. Her touch is fire against him and he has to distance himself from the flames. He feels that if he doesn't, he will burn to ash long before the flames die out.

And still, there are times where she will stay in her room for days. The day she touched his face was one of them.

Even still, he feels the ice around her thaw, piece by piece.

He is tired of winter, tired of the cold biting into his eyes every time he walks outside. So when March hits and the first warm spell comes, he nearly rips his coat off to run outside and bask in it. Max follows like she is stumbling out of hibernation. She's grumpier than normal, scowling at the birds, pulling the hood on her jacket over her face to block the sunlight.

She paces around him, her eyes on the ground and he blabbers about this new time travel movie he'd heard about. The reviews had been amazing and he'd spent most of the night reading whatever he could find about it. He talks as he usually does, to fill the space between them, but then she's still and he nearly trips over her as she grabs a hold of him.

"Yes," she exclaims when he hasn't asked a question. He studies her face, her wild eyes and fingernails digging into his hand, and then it hits him that she's talking about the movie. She wants to go.

"Oh." The wind is nearly knocked out of him. He doesn't realize he's squeezing her hands until his own hands grow numb. Then he lets go of her and apologizes over and over again. He is a broken record, always stuttering apologies, falling over himself, and apologizing once again.

She punches him in the arm, her eyes twinkling with mischief. It reminds him so much of the old Max that he nearly kisses her. Instead, he shoves his hands into his pockets of his jeans and shrugs. He's going for nonchalant, but his voice shakes when he says, "all right, Maximus, can't deny a woman who knows what she wants."

It's almost as if she's completely lost her mind and when she collapses onto the ground, he panics and thinks she has just passed out. But then she's twirling the grass between her fingers, biting her lip in concentration. So he falls down next to her, the air leaving him a little too harshly and he swears she's laughing at him.

He doesn't know what to do with this girl who is steel in a glass cage. She drops a piece of grass onto his face and as he swipes it away, she's laughing for real.


	2. Chapter 2

Warren's a mess by the time she meets him at his car. This isn't a date; it's so far from a date that he feels like an asshole for even telling her she looks pretty. She doesn't even blush, she's so out of it. The usual glaze is over her eyes. He suggests maybe they should take a rain check, but she tells him to stop being ridiculous and just go.

He fidgets in his seat, and Max continues to worsen as the movie plays. When he sees her shoulders tense, he doesn't know if he should comfort her or let her be. Her breath is sharp and quick beside him and he thinks she might be hyperventilating. "Max," he whispers, but then she's out of the seat, running for the exit and he does the only thing he can think to do, which is to run after her.

She's standing by the door, gulping the cool air and he raises a tentative hand towards her. "Max?" he tries again.

She spins around, her eyes wild but flashing with determination. "Let's get out of here."

He just nods and walks to his car as she trails behind.

He doesn't know where to go, so he just drives. She's lost in her head again, if there'd ever been a moment today where she wasn't, and that makes him get lost in his own thoughts. He grips the steering wheel and sneaks a glance over to where Max is toying with her bag, the _ripriprip_ of the velcro enormously loud in the silence.

"What's up?" he finally says, and the velcro pauses in mid _rip,_ which makes the silence all the more worse. She fumbles in her bag for something and hands him a stack of polaroids. Her expression turns his blood to ice in his veins and he pulls over because his hands won't stop shaking. This is _the thing._ He can tell. Whatever that has been buried deep in her nightmares is sitting in front of him in these little square photographs. She looks as if she is about to scream and scream into the night.

He forces a smile on his face, but it feels too tight and too false. He flips through the photos, unfamiliar scenes before him. There's one of her and Chloe, but that can't be right, because this one looks recent and she hadn't seen Chloe for five years. There's a blue butterfly poised above a wastebasket. And then his breath catches as he flips to the last one, where he's posed with Max, his eye swollen and bruised, and looking obliviously happy, drunk even. He flips through them again. And then again. He laughs because he doesn't know what else to do, but Max sits staring ahead, her hands clamped tightly in her lap.

"That is one killer black eye. I don't remember this being taken. Or getting a black eye for that matter." He feels his voice growing higher with hysteria and he clears his throat. He flips through the photos once again and then studies Max.

"Warren," she sighs and then it tumbles out of her. It's the type of thing he'd expect to see in a movie—time travel, rewriting time, powers with no real explanation. He feels the lines in his vision blurring a bit as she tells him of all the people she's saved and things she's stopped. She's showing him something impossible that sits in his fingertips.

He wants to believe her. He wants to believe her so desperately, he can feel it pulsing in his heart. But he just can't ignore the rules of physics that are practically embedded in his brain.

But the words keep tumbling from her lips and when she lists all the things that _fucker_ had done to her, the man who they'd whisked away last autumn with all those horrible accusations, something even uglier buried into his chest. It doesn't matter that he can't line up multiple timelines in his head, that quantum physics is all just theory at its finest, that he can't grasp this situation in all its entirety, the idea that someone who had a responsibility to mentor his students, to look out for them had done something so vile, and to _her_ broke him. Twelve billion seconds without her easy smile, her teasing banter. Twelve billion seconds where he wondered over and over if he could save her, if she could save herself.

It's only when he cradles her face in his hands and presses his forehead to hers that he's realized he's pretty lost himself. And when she closes her eyes against his breath on her face, he vows that no one will hurt her again.

She pulls away, leaning against the window, but she slips her hand into his. He holds it the rest of the way home, afraid that if he lets her go, she will disappear like smoke.

He walks her to her dorm and hesitates as she faces him, something desperate trapped in her eyes and something desperate trapped in his chest.

"Stay?" she whispers and of course he does, because she's wrapped a string around his heart and pulled him close to her. He's afraid of what will happens if it breaks.


End file.
